How Can I Help You?

    If my principal ever leaves, I’m leaving with her. She better not even think of whispering the word “retirement” around me, because I’ll up and retire with her. In the midst of the excruciating 6-month-long wait until my National Board results came, we were chatting in her office about the following year. I said something like, “Well, it’ll depend on the results.” “Oh, you’ll pass,” she said. She said it with such confidence that it made me stop short.  She comes into my classroom on a weekly basis, and I love it. She knows me. At my beginning of the year goal setting meeting, she brought up the fact that I hadn’t enrolled in our organization's Pathways Development program and followed it with “So, tell me, what wonderful thing are you pursuing this year?” I told her I was stuck between starting my Master’s and seeing if I could get into the SDAWP’s Summer Institute program. “Which one are you excited about?” Well, that settled it. She checked in on me partway through the year, “You’ve got a lot on your plate and although you show no signs of being overwhelmed or stressed, how can I help you?” (Notice it was not “Can I help you?” it was “How can I help you?”) I told her it was the same thing I’ve been dealing with for years–a good work/life balance. Before we had finished our conversation, there was an email with a coupon for three free meals through a delivery company. She is not a person of empty words, no infuriating “Practice self-care” or “Take time for you”. She is an admin of action. 

Which makes me so damn mad.

    It makes me mad because for eight years before this school, before her, I would fight through gasping tears or stamped down softballs of anxiety that made me wash cold and hot before walking into school. I was driving home from that school one day when I found myself thinking, “This job is going to kill me. I’m going to die here.” I am not being hyperbolic. That was the day I had driven one of my best work friends to the emergency room during school hours. She had come into work saying that she didn’t feel great and her heart was racing. Minutes passed, and one side of her face began to droop, and her speech became confused. She refused an ambulance, which found us both in my car, speeding down the 78 to the Emergency Room. I drove my best friend, who we thought was in the midst of a stroke, to the ER. The whole time, I was keeping an eye out for a good place where I could pull over if needed. I was also reminding myself of all the CPR training I’ve done over the years, so that she could have a chance of life if it came to that. On the one hand, I’m glad it was me. She’s my best friend; her husband and I talk books, and her kids always greet me with hugs and discussions about their latest writing. On the other hand, it hits me again and again how messed up it is that my school left her life in my hands, never once considering what it could do to both of us if the worst happened. 

This is the school where, if we questioned something we were being asked to do, it was implied that we were being lazy and that there were plenty of other people who could do our job. 

This is the school where, in the eight years I taught, my principal never once came into my classroom because we did peer reviews–why should she come in if our peers were already doing it?

This is the school where, after months of online learning, my principal still spent five minutes trying to figure out how to share her screen because she had never had to do it herself before then.

This is the school where, after my friend was cleared to return to work they said she wasn’t pulling her weight and needed to add additional tasks to her schedule. 

That’s why I’m mad. 

    One of the many important things explored during the Summer Institute is the necessity of creating, cultivating, and examining shared experiences. It is underlined that without shared experiences and a willingness to engage in shared experiences, how can we understand each other, how can we trust each other, how can we grow? 

My students may walk paths I haven’t and may hold very different beliefs and values than I do, but the contract I willingly entered into when I became a teacher demands that I meet them where they are.

 It demands that I see their potential before they can.

 It demands that I am equipped to push them to levels previously unavailable to them. 

    That contract doesn’t suddenly disappear or become null and void when teachers become admins. If anything, it should become more firmly etched into the fibers of one’s professional DNA, because now more students are under their umbrella of duty than just a single class. And yet, it doesn’t always seem to work that way. Instead, sometimes, it seems that admin closes that umbrella completely. In doing so, they turn their backs and their hearts on the contract that led them into this profession in the first place. By replacing shared experiences and a fidelity to the teacher contract with the busy-ness of meetings, emails, and optics, administrators short-change themselves, their staff, and their students because the relationship aspect of the profession has been removed. Where does the refilling of cups happen for administrators who aren’t connected to their teachers and therefore can’t share in their joys and successes? At meetings? I hardly think so.

    Ideally, every administrator should have the opportunity, the gift, to engage in shared experiences with their teachers routinely throughout their administrative career. There is no shortage of ways this can be accomplished, as evidenced by my current, excellent admin. For administrators who see this as an area of growth for themselves, however, one way would be in support of a teacher who is either new or has requested mentorship. For a month, the administrator would step back into their old shoes and experience the joy and heartbreak of teaching. For a short period of time, the administrator would take over a classroom completely: planning, behavior management, differentiation, IEP meetings, parent emails… everything.  Imagine the insight both parties could benefit from by this shared experience. Imagine the confidence this would instill in the staff to know that their administrator leads by example and from experience. 

    I know there are admin out there who do care, but logistically can’t put something of such a grand scale into place. To those I offer the following: to help prevent your teachers from thinking that their beloved profession will kill them, ask them with intentionality and follow-through, “How can I help?” not “Can I help?”